Emotions are difficult to understand, even for humans. Because of this, building AI systems to accurately identify emotions is also a hard problem to solve. Many things can factor into how someone reads another person’s emotions: tonality, facial expression, context, words said, nonverbal cues, etc.

Coined by Dr. Milton, the double empathy problem challenges us to rethink the dynamics of communication and understanding across neurotypes. By exploring the double empathy problem, we can work towards fostering more inclusive and empathetic communication in our increasingly neurodiverse world.

Sensory substitution and augmentation have emerged as innovative approaches to enhance human perception and interaction with the world. By providing alternative means of accessing and processing information, these technologies can compensate for sensory impairments, enrich experiences, and offer new possibilities for communication and exploration. In this post, we will delve into the history and science behind sensory substitution and augmentation, with a special focus on haptic technology.

Alexithymia is a condition characterized by difficulty in identifying, describing, and understanding one's own emotions and those of others. This can significantly impact social interactions, emotional regulation, and overall quality of life. While alexithymia can affect anyone, it is more commonly found in autistic people and those with ADHD.

Neurodiversity spans the vastness of neural baselines and urges us to consider that there is not one optimal neural circuitry. And this idea changes our understanding of what it means to be autistic, dyslexic, or to have ADHD.

A new Stanford University study finds that autistic children have “aberrant functional connectivity between voice-sensitive auditory cortex and the bilateral TPJ during emotional prosody processing.”